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March 7, 2011

Words You Hear Only During Baseball Broadcasts

The language of baseball is unique -- chin music, can of corn, wheelhouse, ducks on the pond, Uncle Charlie. It also contains numerous words and phrases that have virtually disappeared from common use outside the ballpark.

Does anyone actually ever use the word "pilfer" in normal conversation? I doubt it (unless you are taking a pilfer your headache). But we hear those words on baseball broadcasts and some of us grow up to be announcers and we simply keep using them. Some phrases are now offered with a wink; the "guy-who-makes-a-great-catch-to-end-an-inning-leads-off-the-next-inning" is pretty much used only ironically.

Here are a few phrases I jotted down last season. I'm sure you can think of others.

* From the Donnybrook Fair, an apparently rowdy festival held in Ireland as far back as 1204. In that respect, it is like "bedlam".

Here are two words for errors you don't really hear anymore: muff and boner.

Back in 2007, in a Baseball Fever thread entitled "Most Cliched Baseball Phrases", someone noted what John Sterling says every time the New York nine complete a victory:

I get the concept of homerism and the fact that announcers are not merely objective observers devoid of partisan emotion, but yech. This call is horrific. Imagine if the famous call of Russ Hodges had been repeated by him after every Giants victory. Wouldn't you be a bit embarrassed as a fan to hear, "The Giants win the game! The Giants win the game! The Giants win the Game!" every time they won?

This is a brilliant example of why Sterling (and many others, to a lesser degree) is such a dismal announcer. Every play in baseball, every situation, is unique -- and deserves to be treated as such. When he uses the same catchphrase over and over, he demeans the game and, as a radio announcer, describing what is happening for people who cannot see it, he lays bare his arrogance and laziness.

I can't stand when an announcer uses the term "fisted" when someone gets jammed with a pitch.

Also, and I don't know why, but I don't like when an announcer says that a pitcher has been "economical" with his pitches, I always thought "efficient" would be better, because you can certainly be economically inefficient.

I was watching the 5th Inning of Ken Burns' Baseball yesterday, when the focus was on Red Barber, one of the first radio announcers. He made up a lot of good expressions as well as introduced some that have become standard, like "back back back" for a fly ball that becomes a home run.

Wikipedia has a good list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Barber

We lawyers use "induce" all the time---did the promise induce the reliance by the promisee? Did the misrepresentation induce the other party to enter the contract? Those are two that come to mind immediately for me as I am teaching Contracts.

Great post! I love to think about how language evolves and what causes those changes. Or induces them. :)

Several nautical terms in baseball, too: on deck, in the hole (or is it hold?),

I've heard--and maybe this is merely local chauvinism-- that these terms originated in Belfast ME, my postal code, when a bunch of local sailors were playing barnstorming major leaguers. Probably apocryphal....

I liked that list very much! Too bad MFLB.com won't sell me my 19.95audio subscription so I can hear them in use.

My students do not know 'out of left field' though it's my favorite place to approach them from, and if it weren't for their parents playing Meat Loaf I doubt they would have a clue about getting to first base, second base--their sex lives are a bit more sophisticated than ours were in the fifties.

My son in law used an expression yesterday that I had never heard before. We were watching the Red Sox/Mets game, and he asked whether a particular player (Ryan Kalish, I think) had had a "cup of coffee." I had never heard that expression and asked what he meant. He said it referred to a short stint on the team last year. Is this just my son in law, or is that a generally known baseball expression?

An interesting point is that I teach English here in Japan, where a number of my co-workers are from other parts of the English speaking world. Idioms from baseball - like "out of left field" - often stump them as much as the students!

Hi everyone, Thanks so much for the information. I'll start checking out some of this material, and I like the Belfast, Maine theory for 'on deck' although I suspect that despite this important role in the history of the game, Belfast is not the likely source for 'bullpen.'

I think Allan meant to include cup of coffee on the list in this post.

No, that would not apply. Neither would something like frozen rope.

Induce and pilfer are perfect. A word like forsooth would be perfect, too, if it was used in baseball -- archaic words no longer used in the 21st Century. (Though I think "pilfer a bag" is now used ironically.)

Rubbers, at least, goes back to the 16th century. It is actually a bowling term. I wonder how many of these terms come from other games and baseball is keeping the other games' terminology alive?

A baseball term that has fallen out of usage due to modern rule changes, but I am trying to get it back via wiffleball, is 'soaking' as a term for when the fielder gets out a baserunner by hitting said runner with a thrown ball, as in "I soaked you in the head just before your foot touched first." This, I think, I first heard of in the Burns series.

I've said before that game stories back in the 1910s used the term franked for being walked. E.g., "Dice was in a groove, but after he franked Jeter, he lost his focus and allowed two dongs." It is a postal expression, but it is not used in baseball anymore. Do postal people use it?